Few writers even mentioned him in the eighteenth century, although the few included Thomas Gray and Thomas Warton, both of whom had kind things to say about him.
Unfortunately this early attempt at rehabilitation was thwarted in 1802 by "scholar-at-arms" Joseph Ritson in one of the most brutally negative critiques ever written. To him Lydgate was a "voluminous, prosaick, and driveling monk" whose "stupid and fatiguing productions ... by no means deserve the name of poetry ... are neither worth collecting ... nor even worthy of preservation." Although pedantic, contentious, and eccentric, Ritson nevertheless was an indefatigable scholar and a meticulous editor of earlier English poetry. His forcefully expressed opinion of Lydgate was to influence critical opinion for the next 150 years. Scholars are still not totally free of it, although they now know, or should know, better. Joseph Schick's thoughtful introduction to The Temple of Glas (1891) gives a kinder, better-informed view of its poet and can be said to be the beginning of modern Lydgate studies. On the whole Lydgate has been better regarded by his editors than by nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century critics and literary historians, who usually did little more than to repeat in their own words what they had read about him in previous histories of literature.
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